Tesla and Google don’t care about our degree. So there must be another way.

Published in

Skyllz

3 min readJan 30, 2018

In the perfect Skyllz world that our team is working to build, we picture education — especially higher education — and the labor market as two pieces which fit together perfectly within the big picture of society.

As markets evolve and require new ecosystems, so should education.

Same rhythm.

Same adaptability.

And exactly the same flexibility.

While markets and companies move nimbly within this huge ocean like fast little fish (startups), education is still the same old bulky blue whale (the school system). A big gap separates these two worlds and we’re here to try and pull them together.

The market is calling for problem-solving minds, risk-takers, doers, decision-makers and creative thinkers ready to engage with this new shift. Higher education keeps producing fluffy students who never got their hands dirty and whose only “weapon” is the identical theoretical basis they’ve been trained on all the time. A focus on academic achievements does not properly equip young people with good odds of navigating the hiring process and successfully developing their careers.

Top companies like Google or Tesla, headed by the super-entrepreneur Elon Musk, insist that, when it comes to hiring talent, they don’t care what college candidates graduated from or if they even graduated at all. Laszlo Bock, former Senior Vice President of People Operations at Google, claims “some data, such as G.P.A’s, to be essentially worthless in assessing job candidates. We found that they don’t predict anything”. [1]

These tech giants are leading the way. Other companies must either adapt their hiring practices or lose their so-needed talents.

So, are there any educational alternatives?
Of course there are.

In the Age of Information, a new way of education was always going to emerge. New generations are now engaging in more self-directed learning experiences, taking true ownership of their educational journey. This is the only way they can accomplish their needs, goals and interests. It is the only way they can live meaningful and remarkable careers.

Initiatives like MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) represent online alternatives to the theoretical part of education while platforms like Workkola promote a more practical approach, allowing students to collaborate with startups on real projects.

This alternative way to traditional education lacks support and consistency. Creating and developing a universal framework in which all the problem-solving minds feel connected and included, is our main mission.

This framework is a blockchain-based protocol meant to build a distributed, meritocratic, transparent and unified platform to assess, validate and empower any human positive skills across any applications (e-learning and networking platforms, online portfolios, offline education…)